1 During the disaster known as La Tragedia, [1] which struck Venezuela in December 1999, the government accommodated and supported a large population of disaster victims in the military area approximately 150,000 people and then began a policy of mass relocation to the provinces. Following the collapses and mudslides that devastated a large portion of the state of Vargas and the northern part of Caracas, Hugo Chávez's government declared a state of emergency in order to enable the army to enter the affected areas and evacuate the endangered population. However, this state of emergency paved the way not only for human rights’ violations and other atrocities but also for the normalization of a military order. The apparently contradictory idea of “compassionate militarization” (Vásquez Lezama 2010a) is applicable to this case of the legitimization of the intervention of soldiers in an exceptional situation and the maintenance of their presence via the installation of military order in society.

2 This article is based specifically on the temporary stay of the disaster victims of La Tragedia in military forts. [2] The objective is to discern how accommodation in these sites is part of what I will call a “public humanitarian action,” understood here as a range of social actions and interventions developed in the context of emergencies and implemented by a national government. The humanitarian protagonist of La Tragedia was indeed the Venezuelan government, and the relief was consolidated as an activity specific to the national bureaucracy. [3] After the rescue, the disaster victims went to “shelters” set up in the military area—forts, barracks, naval bases—or under the supervision of military troops. These were spaces that were set up, managed, and maintained within and through the apparatus of the armed forces (military warehouses, barracks, air bases, and military and naval police headquarters). Beginning on Saturday, December 18, 1999, the survivors were transferred and settled in temporary receiving sites in Caracas that were set up in military forts and schools. There the disaster victims were separated according to social background. Well-off families were most often placed in provisional lodgings with relatives or friends, while families of working-class background were evacuated to military forts following the decision of the army's top leadership to clear out the affected area. The military authorities chose cities that had forts with a lot of space to spare and that were near airports. The military forts and air bases of Maracay and Barquisimeto, among others, started receiving families in distress on around December 19, 1999. The reception in all the large forts and garrisons required a military mobilization that was unprecedented in the recent history of the country's armed forces. A full year passed before the disaster victims left these sites. President Hugo Chávez had promised to relocate all of them before the first anniversary of the catastrophe, that is, in December 2000.

3 The shelters operated for a year—from December 1999 to December 2000—and evolved over time according to changes in the means of assistance and in the characteristics and amount of domestic and international aid to be distributed. The organizations that were responsible for relief were the armed forces, as part of a special military program called Plan Bolívar 2000 (PB 2000) and an institution for financing and carrying out social projects, the Fondo Unico Social (FUS), which was also managed by military officers. From the first week of January 2000, the schools in the state of Vargas and the city of Caracas lodging families of disaster victims were evacuated in order to receive the schools' students. In February, 25,000 people were lodged in military forts: [4] 5,000 at Fort Tiuna and 20,000 at other forts around the country. In March, the FUS coordinator specified that 2,000 new families had just arrived at the shelter, bringing to 81,912 the number of persons whose basic physical needs, including three meals per day, clothing, and medicine, the government needed to take care of.

4 I will focus on the way in which this specific governmental intervention led to normalizing the presence of soldiers in the daily life of the disaster victims and, more broadly, to legitimizing the intervention of the armed forces in social life in the longer term. This analysis is developed from the ethnography of a barracks inside the Tiuna fort, [5] located in Caracas, which is also the headquarters of the Ministry of Defense and the country's largest battalions. The material used here therefore comes from an ethnographic corpus comprised of interviews conducted with disaster victims and soldiers, and of observations of scenes occurring in this fort during the occupation of the barracks in 2000 and part of 2001. [6] Broader field observations conducted between 2000 and 2005 over the course of seven stays [7] and the analysis of the series of different stages of the relief enabled me to discern a typology of shelters that were, in chronological order: emergency shelters, temporary lodging, and confinement shelters located in the city to welcome “returning” families who had left the lodgings that had been given to them in the provinces. This rehousing in fact involved the relocation of disaster victims to the provinces. Government advisers (Giordani 2004; Pacheco 2004) required the families to vacate the working-class barrios of the affected urban areas of Caracas and Vargas. The houses that were offered were generally located in the provinces, in the suburbs of cities that were far from La Guaira and Caracas such as Maracaibo, Guanare, El Tigre, Barquisimeto, San Carlos, and so on, thus requiring families to leave their place of origin. While the families were awaiting this relocation, their daily lives in the Fort Tiuna shelter were structured around three poles connected to the distribution of humanitarian aid: the procurement, consumption, and distribution of food; the free movement inside the fort and the regulation of entrance and exit hours; and the allocation of positions in the temporary employment plans offered to the disaster victims. These jobs included maintenance and cleaning of the facilities.

La Tragedia and National Reorganization

5 The distinctive feature of the management of La Tragedia of December 1999 comes from the historical context of the national reorganization that Venezuela was experiencing at the time: the day of the most devastating mudslides, December 15, 2009, coincided with the referendum to approve the new, “Bolivarian” constitution. The executive power's decisions in favor of militarization thus benefited from a national consensus borne by a feeling of compassion for the victims (Fassin and Vásquez, 2005). This complex and ambiguous situation was, however, characterized just as much by the deployment of military forces in order to manage survivors and victims as by the atrocities committed by the law enforcement agencies in order to suppress the pillaging in the affected area.

6 La Tragedia reveals the paradoxes of Venezuela's history: the previous governments’ negligence in implementing fair and equitable urban development, the corruption of the institutions, and the representatives' abandonment of the people. The modern Venezuelan government is based on a rentier economic policy that is marked by the wealth coming from petroleum and that paradoxically reproduces and deepens economic, political, and social inequalities. In 1976, with the nationalization of the petroleum industry, the government's role with regard to society became ambivalent: on the one hand, it continued to be a rentier government that distributed these revenues in patronage networks; on the other hand, it behaved as an investor and dedicated an increasing share of its revenue to the maintenance of its production potential (Gómez Calcaño 1998, 31). This gap is at the base of the crisis of the political regime that was in place between 1958 and 1998. In February 1983, the economic crisis and the devaluation of the bolivar led to a progressive fracturing of the political system and inevitably undermined the bases of legitimacy of the political parties of the Pacto de Punto Fijo as mediators between the government and the citizens. This crisis led successive governments to implement a reduction in per capita public spending, particularly in terms of physical infrastructure and services (sanitation, channeling of wastewater and distribution of drinking water, electricity, schools, and health clinics) (Baldó 1993), and to double taxes as of 1984. There followed a series of violent events, such as the riots of February 27, 1989—the Caracazo—and the failed coups d'état of the Bolivarian officials in February and November 1992, when the commander Hugo Chávez appeared on the political scene for the first time. Imprisoned and then amnestied in 1994, Chávez triumphed at the ballot boxes in December 1998. His first year of government saw the election of a Constituent Assembly whose work culminated in the drafting of a new, so-called Bolivarian constitutional charter, which promised a more socially egalitarian future based on the redistribution of petroleum revenue. This charter was approved through a referendum on December 15, 1999, the very day of La Tragedia. President Chávez's response to the December 1999 catastrophe occurred in this context. The revolutionary government seized on the event by promising to “reestablish the lost dignity” of the poor victims of La Tragedia, thus extending the identification of the disaster victims to all the country's poor (Vásquez Lezama 2010b). By calling up this societal expectation for social change heralded by the revolution, the official discourse related to relief was constructed. The aid to victims fell under a public humanitarian action based on a series of militarized operations: food, lodging, temporary employment, and relocation relief. This policy of national humanitarian aid was named the “Plan de dignificación de la familia venezolana” by president Hugo Chávez. [8] Seventy percent of the families who were housed in the military areas lived below the poverty line before the disaster (España et al. 2000).

Official poster announcing the construction of accommodation for the dignificados. Charallave, state of Miranda, Venezuela, November 2001. Photo by the author.

Managing Food and Movement at the Military Fort

7 Throughout the stay between evacuation and relocation in the provinces, the administration of the Fort Tiuna shelter centered around two main tasks: the distribution of meals for the families housed there and the monitoring of civilians' entrances, exits, and visits. Food was at the center of a conflict between the disaster victims, the shelter authorities (soldiers), and the people in charge of distributing accommodation (FUS civil servants). Accessing the meals and consuming them made it possible to occupy the premises and to reaffirm their need to be aided and recognized in their condition and status of disaster victim in order to put pressure on the FUS civil servants who granted the accommodation. However, the quality of the meals and the portion sizes were reduced over time. In June 2000, the delivery of the foodstuffs of the first months had diminished considerably, and only the Spanish partnership, through the local committee of the Red Cross, provided basic products for meal preparation (precooked cornflour, pasta, oats, and black beans). In May 2000, the refectory of the Fort Tiuna barracks offered a “special menu” comprised of food that differed from that which went to the troops. [9] To justify this limited offering, the military authorities who were interviewed said that the calorie content of a soldier's daily meal, which was calculated based on intense physical activity, was not suitable for the disaster victims. The military authorities specified that the army's food service set the troops' menus based on a “man-to-grams” ratio. According to the head of the FUS, this “over-rich” food had produced “digestive disturbances” in the disaster victims during their first weeks at the fort. She thus made a connection to the violent epidemic of gastroenteritis that affected around 20 children who were staying in a theater located near the fort (the Poliedro housed more than 10,000 people for several months) after they consumed spoiled food provided by the military canteens. [10] In the face of rumors of food poisoning linked to the expiration of the foodstuffs, the institutions replied by speaking of the inappropriateness of the menus served to the troops for the needs of the disaster victims: “The foods that are given to the soldiers have too much fat, and the families ate them in excess” (FUS agent, Fort Tiuna, Caracas, May 2000). The authorities recommended meals in “special” portions that were smaller and lighter in calories.

8 However, to the disaster victims, these institutions (the FUS and the PB 2000) were replacing the “good food” that had been meant for them with food of inferior quality, and were thus diverting the humanitarian food aid. Every day, rumors circulated about thefts of humanitarian aid or about soldiers' concealment of it. The disaster victims confided to me that they did not see any distributions of donations: “We see refrigerated trucks with chicken and pork and we are given only canned sardines or tinned meat. . . . We do not complain about the canned sardines in the refectory meal. But what is hard to tolerate is never getting what is meant for us” (José Antonio, [11] Fort Tiuna, May 28, 2000).

9 The truth about the poor distribution of donations was not revealed until years later. In 2003, 40 tons of food coming from the European Union (international aid) and the Rotary Club (domestic donations) were discovered in the Puerto Cabello military warehouses and then incinerated by the Venezuelan navy in its war implements distribution center. [12] However, in 2000, this unease did not go beyond rumor and was fueled by the problems of delivering food to the forts and the impossibility of cooking there due to prohibitions on having gas cookers in the rooms and on accessing the troops' refectory. Mothers with young children had to cross the barracks to reheat a bottle during the night. The soldiers finally gave in to the request to install cooking ranges in the “apartments,” as the “rooms” were called—they were actually bunk beds separated by cloth partitions—because the pressure had become too strong due to the lengthening of the stay and the failures in the meal distribution service. Following this authorization, small restaurants appeared in the barracks. These canteens demonstrated the relaxing of the rules that were initially imposed and the entrepreneurial spirit of the disaster victims, primarily women. The issue of the food highlights the pitfalls in the material management of the relief by the soldiers who were no longer able to distribute it; in addition, the soldiers did not permit the disaster victims to cook, which would have involved alterations in the structure of the barracks and the establishment of a civil and familial routine disrupting order and discipline. The food issue thus revealed the paradoxical effects of a series of practical arrangements that led to the systematic restriction of the disaster victims' independence.

The Traps of Temporality and Disaster Relief in the Military Area

10 Eleven years after La Tragedia, living in a refugio de damnificados has become a situation that is both emblematic and banal in Venezuela, to the point that since the 2001 census, the National Institute of Statistics has considered such shelters to be full-fledged places of residence.

11 During a visit to a refugio during the crisis, President Chávez had promised to relocate all the disaster victims before the first anniversary of the disaster, that is, December 2000. In January 2001, all the refugees located in the military area were evacuated, but the relocation occurred under precarious conditions. For complex and varying reasons, many families did not stay in the new lodgings given to them by the government (isolation, lack of means of transportation and jobs, major construction defects, etc.), and they returned to the shelters between 2001 and 2003 in a disorganized and unplanned manner, which led to their perenniality.

12 Returning to stays in the military area in 2000, food was at the center of a conflict that for the women disaster victims was part of their quest for visibility. They saw themselves as being unfairly excluded by eligibility criteria at work in the execution of the assistance programs, particularly in terms of how temporary jobs in the new lodgings were allocated. Yelvington (1997) mentions an identical situation in his study of disaster victims accommodated in encampments under soldiers' oversight (tent cities) after Hurricane Andrew passed through Florida in 1992. Like the Fort Tiuna shelters, the tent cities were installed in a temporary manner by the soldiers. Staying in a temporary shelter under military supervision is often a less complicated solution than accessing aid from relatives or friends, and is often seen by those thus accommodated as the only means to benefit from the promised aid.

13 Daily life in the transit shelters located in military areas was filled with the issues inherent in the transition from a temporality of emergency to one of normality in humanitarian action (Atlani-Duault and Vidal 2009). And the Venezuelan dignificación program henceforth revealed its paradoxes: it was defined as an emergency program, but it also was set up as a permanent public policy. [13] This shift in meaning therefore revealed the political dimension of the military intervention; the PB 2000 and FUS had become components of development projects of the Bolivarian government in a context marked by great administrative uncertainty about the end of the relief and the required relocation. The functioning of the shelters, and more broadly, the relief, is an emblematic case of the moral arrangement of social policies. The unrestricted movement—entrances and exits from the fort but also inside the battalions—caused friction and called into question the soldiers' ability to monitor it. For some high-ranking officials, the single fact that these areas were inhabited inherently damaged the military world. The damages that these civilians caused were for them not only physical but also moral. Over time, the authorities had to manage the families' behavior at the cost of transgressions of the rules of military space. According to the officers, the facilities were becoming dilapidated because the disaster victims did not know how to use them: “The damnificados do not know how to use the WC, and they have already destroyed the Poliedro, so they need to be prevented from destroying our facilities too” (military authority, Fort Tiuna, May 2000). But the battalion commanders especially wanted to keep the barracks from resembling ordinary lodgings: the image of an inhabited house—especially by women and children—made them uneasy. What could be further from the rigors of military discipline than laundry, especially that of women and children, drying on the metal gates preventing access to the hangars that sheltered the tanks and war machines? “OK. We can do laundry over there [in the large sinks in the courtyard], but the commander doesn't let us dry the laundry in the sun, or anywhere, so we need to look for a place to put our things. . . . But the problem is that we can't leave our laundry alone because it gets stolen right away. You need to stay near the laundry” (interview with Carolina, May 18, 2000, Fort Tiuna, Caracas).

Dignificados returning to Vargas occupy the Guipuzcoana house, the headquarters of the state government. La Guaira, Venzuela, November 2001. Photo by the author.

14 The soldiers' attitudes ranged from paternal and protective authority on the part of some career officers who worried about the families' “fates” to indifference on the part of other officers who opposed civilian use of the barracks. Among the disaster victims, the women and children were the most dependent on the soldiers’ decisions and the benefits that could arise. The battalion's senior officer determined the criteria for the “smooth operating of the shelter,” which varied according to the behavior of the subordinate group, which was comprised of soldiers, women, adolescents, and children. The commanders were rotated every two or three months, and the establishment of new orders upon each new takeover led to significant instability for the disaster victims, who then needed to reorganize their routines. Consequently, every new commander was deemed authoritative by the disaster victims. This is the issue of the “changing of the guard” that Yelvington (1997, 108) refers to when he addresses the inadequacy of administrative orders for the daily arrangements for adapting to them in the tent cities that were set up in Miami in 1992. In addition, these rotations put an end to possible processes that commanders had initiated to help the families. However, the success of the improvement in accommodation conditions, even the allocation of accommodation, depended in large part on the commander's power and his influence in the upper spheres of power. The female disaster victims knew very well that if the commanders were sensitive to their situation, they quickly obtained aid or services for their family. It was in this context that I saw female disaster victims break into tears upon the announcement of a colonel's transfer to another battalion. Another example is the following: Rosana by chance found out the birthday of the Fort Tiuna garrison commander, who every month celebrated the children's birthdays, so she organized a surprise party for him complete with a cake baked in the oven lent by the barracks' refectory cook and with drawings by the children. The commander's empathetic attitude was also associated with authoritative behavior that, from the perspective of some families, was exercised for everyone's good.

Temporary Jobs for the Disaster Victims

15 The issues raised by unrestricted movement and access to food by the disaster victim families lodged in military facilities sprang from the relief arrangements that limited the subjects' independence in these confined spaces. In this sense, the question of access to work, and therefore the possibility of having a salary that would permit an increase in the family head’s room for maneuver, was very strained in the fort. Living in the fort meant accepting a set of rules that were specific to the military institution, and the behavior of the disaster victims within the context of the PB 2000's temporary work plans was the subject of social control exercised in large part through the challenging of their customs. My visits to the military shelters coincided with the recruitment phase of the work plans coordinated by the FUS civil servants and under the instructions of the army officials. In order to benefit from these positions, the requesters needed to have a “proof of disaster victim status” drawn up by the firemen and cosigned by the FUS, and a proof of original place of residence drawn up by city hall. Without these documents, the family heads could neither benefit from a room, food, or job, nor leave the shelter without losing the places that had been allocated to them during the emergency period.

16 Throughout my field study in the shelters, I accompanied women as they put together their files, which consisted of an identity document and copies of their children's birth certificates proving their number and direct line of descent. However, establishing civil status was very difficult. The obstacles fell under three scenarios. The first was factual: the loss and destruction of identity documents during the disaster. The second was institutional: the institutions responsible for providing the civil status documents operated slowly and inefficiently even in “normal” times. The third was sociological, connected to the precariousness of the mother's life path before the disaster, as they would often send their oldest children to live with family members, grandmothers, and aunts who lived far from Caracas.

17 In the shelters, the women could work as part of the PB 2000 without needing to leave the fort, a situation that enabled them to stay near their children. The interviews revealed that the women, who were often raising young children alone, preferred to have a job in the fort rather than in town because leaving the shelter seemed too risky, both for them and their children. However, there were many women who failed in their attempts to be employed. For example, Carolina no longer felt supported by the fort's institutions: “I wanted to join the program, but I had just given birth when they hired women for jobs. I went to talk to the head and he told me he had no work to offer me, but I then found out that he had said yes to another person without children. It isn't fair” (May 18, 2000, Fort Tiuna, Caracas).

18 All these requirements resulted in the exclusion of women with young children from the work program because requesting a birth certificate or even presenting children at the prefecture is a very complicated process in Caracas, and mothers would often give up (Vásquez Lezama 2009). The institutional process was therefore marked by considerable ambiguity, so much so that at the end of the selection process of candidates for positions specially implemented for the disaster victims, none of the women interviewed could fulfill—and could do so only with difficulty in the near future—the necessary conditions to be hired. In the shelters set up in the forts, the presence of the disaster victims thus constantly put discipline and obedience to the test—fundamental values of the military institution. The disaster victims did not discuss the orders of the noncommissioned officers, but they criticized the rules that structured their lives. The debate, discussion, and questioning related to the tactics of mastering daily life that the disaster victims, particularly the women, were supposed to subtly adopt without directly opposing the authorities of the shelter placed in the military area. This occupation of the barracks by families produced a paradoxical social space that was enlivened by informal debates about the rules, relocation, and location of the promised houses, but in which discipline and the obligation to obey conflicted in the context of the families' devastation and excluded any participation on their part in making decisions that directly affected them.

Lisa with her baby. Aquiles Nazoa shelter in Caricuao, Caracas, Venezuela, August 2004. Photo by the author.

19 With the perenniality of the shelters in the military area, disaster victims and soldiers changed status. Women awaiting a job were no longer victims, but rather potential beneficiaries of a social program, who had to fulfill specific criteria. The soldiers were no longer saviors, but rather resource administrators of the “dignificación plan of the Venezuelan family” functioning in great social, political, and administrative ambiguity. This specific form of governing the consequences of social and political disasters, which I have described in terms of an oxymoron—compassionate militarization (Vásquez Lezama 2010a)—is inscribed at the center of the government’s revolutionary political project marked by the Bolivarianism [14] professed by President Chávez. Contemporary Bolivarianism is a shifting and composite ideology that revives the civic worship paid to Simón Bolívar, the Libertador, who is still present in the official Venezuelan rhetoric of both the left and the right (Straka 2009, 61). This political regime thus makes the harmony of national unity rest on his identification with the “people” (Gomez Calcaño and Arenas 2005), and it justifies the need for the armed forces (particularly the army) as an institution of social salvation. The implementation of this ideology includes the “emergence of the soldiers from the barracks in order to carry out the most important battle, the one against poverty.” [15] The Bolivarian regime is identified with a global “counter-hegemonic” positioning and feeds on a strongly nationalistic sentiment through the militarization of institutions.

20 Compassionate militarization does not only fall under the occasional mobilization of public powers, but also under the redefinition of the role of the armed forces in Venezuelan society. In fact, the principles of Bolivarianism professed by President Hugo Chávez cause the harmony of national unity to be based on a “civil–military pact” in which the troops of the armed forces participate actively in public administration. [16] Thus, since 1999, military officers have been widely involved in the bureaucratic apparatus of civil institutions. Since 2001, between 600 and 2,500 active officials have occupied management positions in civil institutions (Manrique, 2005, 782). These military troops, particularly of the army, are responsible for the implementation of social policies strengthening the militarization of Venezuelan government institutions. [17] However, this form of militarization goes beyond the classical configuration of the transfer of local authority expertise to soldiers in order to cope with an extreme situation (Gilbert 1992) and to develop special temporary actions for managing the crisis. It also differs from the worldwide societal process that legitimizes the allocation of resources to public and private enterprises for purposes of security and defense, such as in the North American post-September 11 context (Lutz 2004). The soldiers have also been socially recharacterized because they manage the bureaucratic apparatus meant to aid disaster victims. This relief for the victims thus becomes a bureaucratic process of “misfortune” (Das 1995, 140–143). The policies of aid to disaster victims therefore articulate two a priori heterogeneous social structures: on the one hand, the army, a fundamental institution of the Bolivarian republic established in 1999; and on the other, the disaster victims, the emblematic figure of the people. The policy of dignificación responding to a new configuration of the connections of authority between government and the governed, its rhetoric, its practices, and its symbolic and aesthetic framework mobilize radically new procedures of political legitimization of the civil–military partnership. The advent of the Bolivarian revolution legitimized the public humanitarian action developed during La Tragedia.